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In the days
following the massive devastation caused by Hurricane Maria news
reports have emphasized the “American citizenship” of Puerto
Ricans. But why are Puerto Ricans suddenly being projected actively
as American citizens when, traditionally, this has not been the case?

The same media
outlets have discovered that most people in the U.S. do not know that
Puerto Ricans hold U.S. citizenship. For many North Americans—who
often suspect that people who speak Spanish and come from a territory
in Latin America are “illegal”—the concept of Puerto Rican's as
“citizens” must be baffling indeed.

The mourning of Mother Earth calls us. Her cry resounds within us. It
is ours. This call echoes her cry. We accept our responsibility. We
call respectfully on her behalf because we understand and feel the
pain: the voice and the cry of Mother Earth. How can we not respond,
when we know that her destruction is our own, of all humanity, of all
life?

August 15, 2017: Politicians of
both major parties have been calling on President Donald Trump to
clearly and specifically denounce the “alt-right” (read
“Nazi/Klan”) violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, on Saturday,
August 12, in response to Trump’s press conference where he instead
blamed “many sides” for what happened. Everyone except Trump
knows that “many sides” are not to blame, only one side is: the
side of racism and bigotry.

What all of these politicians fail to
call for, however, but the citizens of this nation ought to, is for
Trump to not only denounce the violence in Charlottesville but to
take personal responsibility for it, since it was Trump’s public
validation of this previously fringe ideology in US society—both
during his campaign for the presidency and by his post-election
appointments—which created the atmosphere where those who advocate
the most virulent forms of racist ideology are today able to conceive
the kind of demonstration they held in Charlottesville, attempting to
make their variety of racism/white supremacy an accepted ideology not
only in the White House but also in the political discourse of US
society more broadly.

Special Update and Further Commentary on the Release of Oscar Lopez Rivera,

by Matt Meyer

February 9, 2017—Puerto Rican Patriot Oscar Lopez Rivera is now free! Transferred this
morning to San Juan, Puerto Rico, he will not be able to travel, hold meetings,
give speeches or statements until his official date of clemency on May 17, 2017.
He will serve his last days till then in a US federal facility in Puerto Rico.
But he will be able to see his beloved daughter, granddaughter, siblings and
family, to eat the foods of his youth, to see “the water’s edge” of which he
profoundly wrote during his 35 years behind bars for the thought-crime of
seditious conspiracy. He is on his homeland, and though he cannot yet feel the
full force of the embrace of the entire peoples of Puerto Rico, he is
nonetheless surrounded by that love and solidarity.

On Our Duty to Celebrate Oscar,

by Matt Meyer

Immediately
following Obama’s decision to commute the sentence of Oscar Lopez
Rivera, social media was burning up with half-thought-out writings
about the strategies, tactics, and process of the Oscar freedom
campaign. Having served as a leading international associate of Dr.
Luis Nieves Falcon and the Puerto Rican Human Rights Campaign since
the late 1980s, and worked collaboratively with the National Boricua
Human Rights Network since its inception, I have my own thoughts on
what worked best and what mistakes were made along the way. There is,
however, widespread agreement that—as I wrote on the fateful day of
the announcement—Obama’s decision was “based primarily on a
consistently-held, vigorously-fought, simple but stalwart commitment
to decades-long, door-to-door, community-to-community, email-to-email
(or tweet to tweet) building of a massive, grassroots-led
single-minded campaign.” Though important parts of the Campaign
were carried out by the Puerto Rican Diaspora and in some of the
world-wide work, the foundation was clearly centered on the island of
Puerto Rico itself.

Column: "Daylight Time" by Susie Day

First Woman President Nukes Iran

WASHINGTON—President Hillary Clinton, making good on her 2008 threatto"totally obliterate" Iran,celebrated her first week in office by ordering a nuclear strike on Iran's capital city of Tehran. As a squadron of F-35sstreaked
through the sky toward the Mideast metropolis of over eight million,
President Clinton outlined her foreign policy to a bevy of reporters at
a White House press conference.

Ideas for the Struggle

by Marta Harnecker

The following text is made up of
12 articles that were first published in Venezuela in 2004 and that
were slightly modified in 2016. They were written without a
predetermined order in mind and I have preferred to maintain this
order to facilitate discussion with my earlier readers. I recommend
starting from the topic that most interests you and then reading the
rest of the text. As it is impossible to develop all facets of an
idea in two pages, only by reading the whole text will readers be
able to fully understand each individual article—Marta
Harnecker, August 2016

After Bernie—Electoral Strategy for the Left in 2016
by (list of signers)

June, 2016—Now that Donald Trump, an
overt racist, has wrapped up the Republican nomination for US
President, a chorus of voices is proposing a “left strategy”
which can “defeat Trump” by electing the more covert racist,
Hillary Clinton, whom the Democratic Party will almost surely be
nominating.

Too many of us are consumers
within a system that robs us of the fruits of our labor and maximizes
profit for corporations. For a long time, US and global production has
had little to do with satisfying the needs of human beings. Instead,
production is driven by the endless accumulation of wealth, resources,
and power. Too many people spend their lives as just one moving part in
a machine built to deplete and destroy the planet.

The New York City Campaign to Free Russell Maroon Shoatz is
investigating the possibility of an alternative, something we are
calling a “Maroon Exchange,” so we can begin to take back
our own labor, our relationships with each other, our collective
relationship to the earth, and thereby our lives.

Poetry
of Resistance: Imagining
the Overthrow of Capitalist Oppression

by Lauren Schmidt

[NOTE:
This essay was originally a presentation to a panel with the same title
at the Left Forum in New York City, May 31 2015. It was sponsored by
the National Writers Union. Other panelists that day were Lora Tucker,
Raymond Nat Turner, and Martín Espada.]
When I was fourteen years old, I took a book from my high school
English teacher’s shelf, An
Anthology of American Negro Poetry, a book that would introduce
me to the poet who made me want to be a poet: Paul Laurence Dunbar.
Before reading Dunbar and a number of poets in that anthology who would
influence me as a writer—Langston Hughes and Lucille Clifton
chief among them—I had read poets I was supposed to love but
never did: William Wadsworth Longfellow, Emily Dickinson, T.S. Eliot.
It wasDunbar’s
poem, “My Sort o’ Man” that made me say to myself,
“If that’s what poetry can do, I want to be a poet.”

by
Saulo Colón and Daniel Vila for the NYC Committee
for Dignity over Debt in PR

On Monday
June 29, the
Governor of Puerto Rico, Alejandro García Padilla, delivered
a live message to the people of Puerto Rico stating that the
government’s $73 billion debt is unpayable. The governor
stated, “The public debt, considering the present level of
economic
activity, is unpayable.”

I
would like to
encourage readers of this website to listen to Glen Ford (of Black
Agenda Report) speaking at a Socialist Action Canadian conference on
“The Democratic Party, Death Trap for U.S.
Blacks—Independent Labour/Black Political
Action”:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCPVBaO5Cj4
His talk is worth the 45 minutes it takes to listen to—in
particular for those who are considering their attitude toward the
decision by Bernie Sanders to run for the Democratic Party presidential
nomination. It’s also significant in terms of understanding
the
question of “white privilege,” which is a perennial
sticking point for many self-proclaimed socialists and revolutionaries.

I will try to summarize the highlights for those who cannot take the
time to view the entire video, interspersing a few comments of my own
about the implications of Ford’s analysis.

The
Lover of a Subversive
Is Also a
SubversiveColonialism and
the Poetry of
Rebellion
in Puerto
Ricoby
Martín Espada

My
great-grandfather, Buenaventura Roig, was the
mayor of Utuado, a town in the mountains of Puerto Rico. When he died
in 1941, thousands of mourners flocked to his funeral. Almost fifty
years later, my father and I searched for the grave of Buenaventura
Roig.

We
never found it. Instead, we wandered into a
remote cemetery, high up in the mountains, with row after row of stones
dated between 1950 and 1953. These were men killed in a faraway place
called Korea, among the 756 Puerto Ricans who died fighting for the
United States in the Korean War.

My father,
Francisco Luis (Frank) Espada, was
also a Korean War-era veteran. He fought another war, on a different
front, refused service at a segregated diner in San Antonio, Texas,
jailed in Biloxi, Mississippi for refusing to sit at the back of the
bus, subjected to apartheid in the same country he was sworn to defend.

A Brief History of the Black Panther Party and It's Place in the Black Liberation Movement

by Sundiata Acoli

The Black Panther Party
for Self-Defense was founded in October, 1966, in Oakland, California
by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale. The name was shortened to the
Black Panther Party (BPP) and it began spreading eastward through the
Black urban ghetto colonies across the country.

In the summer of ‘68, David Brothers
established a BPP branch in Brooklyn, New York, and a few months
later Lumumba Shakur set up a branch in Harlem, New York. I joined
the Harlem BPP in the fall of ‘68 and served as its finance officer
until arrested on April 2, 1969 in the Panther 21 conspiracy case
which was the opening shot in the government’s nationwide attack on
the BPP. Moving westward, Police Departments in each city made
military raids on BPP offices or homes in Philadelphia, Chicago,
Newark, Omaha, Denver, New Haven, San Diego, Los Angeles, and other
cities, murdering some Panthers and arresting others.

Build and Fight: Beyond Trump and the Limitations of the United Front,

by Kali Akuno and Doug Norberg

Monday, January 23, 2017—On Inauguration Day, we note the considerable range of the opposition to
Trump, from traditional activists to very mainstream folks. In many respects the
opposition mounted was unprecedented, on a day where patriotic and jingoistic
hyperbole is typically concentrated and loudly broadcast more than at any other
time, and when, traditionally, new Presidents make appeals to the heart and to
democratic unity while all who know how false the claims are bite their lips,
party, and hope for the best. The opposition struggling to find expression is
broad and deep. But nearly all expressions of opposition are resorting to
traditional methods of reformist-oriented protest while millions of people
throughout the United States and the world are discussing and debating how they
are going to survive and resist the emerging Presidential regime of Donald Trump
and the rise of right-wing populism and a resurgent “America first” white
nationalism.

On the Trump Victory:

Four Post-Election Messagesby Greg Saunier

Dear artists and musicians,
Don't give up in despair. The narrative that
Trump, Clinton and the corporate media have tried to sell us in
2016 is: "humanity is ugly, cutthroat, dark and pointless. . . .

Dear Trump voters,
Your man is already double-crossing you. . . .

Dear Clinton die-hards,
It is time for you to get out of the way. . . .

Dear progressives,
Thanks to Clinton pocketing 99% of the DNC fundraising
money meant for down ballot races, both houses of Congress will now be
Republican. . . .

My Penny's Worth the Day After the Election

by Steve Bloom

November 9, 2016—I offer my thoughts about the election
for a penny, discounting 50 percent from the usual two-cents worth. I don’t feel
as if I am in a position to demand full price. Although I was not the only one
confidently predicting a Clinton victory for the last several months, it seems
to me that all of us who were making that prediction need to give ourselves a
reality-check based on the actual result. I remember having a similar sense, of
the need for a critical self-reflection, last time I was stunned by the outcome
of an election—in 1990, when the Sandinistas were defeated in Nicaragua. Tuesday
night shook my world with that kind of force. If others are honest I think you will
acknowledge something similar.

Two hundred fifty years
of slavery.
Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal.
Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our
compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.

"Salt of the Earth"
showcases the work of Sebastiao Salgado, a social photographer and former
economist from Brazil. Narrated by Wenders, the film traces Salgado's
development as a photographer and reflects on his projects in Ethiopia, Rwanda,
Yugoslavia, and all over South America. Though he traveled widely, Salgado
explored each location long-term and in-depth, creating evocative and vivid
photo essays of the world's most harrowing places and dispossessed people.

Tribute
to the Families
of Our Political Prisoners
and Prisoners of War

by
Dequi
Kioni-Sadeki

Saturday, January 17th,
2015—Welcome to
this 19th year of fundraising and paying
tribute to the
Families of our political prisoners and prisoners of war. On behalf of
Herman
and Iyaluua Ferguson especially, our founding members and our current
members,
we thank you for being here and for standing in the tradition of Black
love,
Black resistance, Black family and Black community. Some of
y’all have
attended this dinner from its inception; some have come and gone and
come back;
some are here for the first time. Whatever your category, we hope it
won't be
your last time and that we can count on your continued support until we
have no
more freedom fighters held captive behind the walls. We also thank
Michael
Garvey, the 1199 SEIU activists, and the MLK, Jr. Labor
Center’s
staff here
today for helping to make this day what it is.

Dragon
and Hydra Revisited―
A Dialogue

by Steve Bloom and
Russell Maroon Shoatz

Special introductory note by the editors:

In the
“Policies of this
Website” we explain that we are seeking to promote
discussions
“where participants are engaged in active listening and a
search
for commonalities or convergences―giving at least as much emphasis to
this as we do to 'clarifying differences.' The overall goal of our
project is not just to recapitulate well-established views but to
transcend them if/when we can in order to create a stronger collective
synthesis of revolutionary thought.”

We believe that the
exchange below is an
excellent case study in this process and how it can work effectively. .
. .

Introductory note
by SB:In
November of last year I

Most of the attacks on Clinton that I read on Facebook are from Sanders
supporters. Have you also published columns mocking Sanders's pretensions to
speak for the world's oppressed, or is the mockery reserved for Clinton? Do Old
and New supporters view Sanders as a positive alternative to Clinton?

Most of the attacks on Clinton that I read on Facebook are from Sanders
supporters. Have you also published columns mocking Sanders's pretensions to
speak for the world's oppressed, or is the mockery reserved for Clinton? Do Old
and New supporters view Sanders as a positive alternative to Clinton?

sent Maroon a letter about his essay
“Dragon and Hydra,” which read, in part:
“Your
historical assessment regarding the failure of the dragon is
indisputable: Any and all dragon formations that have, at least up to
now, actually succeeded in conquering power ended up transforming
themselves into a new oppressive force of some kind. However, we can
make an equally valid argument regarding the historical failure of
hydra formations. Not one of them has proved up to the task either―if
we define the task as stopping a manifest-destiny imperialism from
dominating and ultimately destroying the planet.”

In
February, as part of
our exchange over this question, I suggested some preliminary
conclusions, explaining that "I might modify or reconsider them as a
result of an exchange with you and/or a discussion in the group. Still,
they represent the general approach I believe, at this point, we ought
to collectively affirm after considering the relevant issues." What
follows is Maroon's response to these four conclusions.

Introductory note
by RMS:This
text
reflects a conversation between veteran activist Steve Bloom and
political prisoner Russell Maroon Shoatz, exploring ways to move the
oppressed and toiling masses' struggle forward, without that struggle
losing control of the very organizations that have served to help
liberate the masses from their primary antagonists.

Fighting for Socialism on Great Turtle Island—
The Struggle Against Settler Colonialism

by Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro

The
U.S. and Canada are settler colonial dictatorships. This is hardly a
revelation. Yet most anti-capitalist leftist radicals seem unaware of
or indifferent to this truth, a fact that is well illustrated by the
paucity of concern expressed in socialist publications and other
outlets with decolonization struggles on Great Turtle Island (the name
some Native Peoples give to what is often called“North
America”). This struggle should, however, be understood as
fundamental to bringing about the demise of U.S. imperialism and
building a post-capitalist alternative. There has, of course, always
been verbal acknowledgment of this and even a few efforts among
socialists to recognize and act upon settler colonialism. Still, it has
rarely figured prominently or centrally in any socialist platform in
this part of the world, nor have the contradictions inherent in a
Eurocentric socialism (in which I include anarchism) been
systematically confronted―at least not without less than flattering
results (see for example the book edited by Ward Churchill, number 7 on
our list of readings below).